YAYOI KUSAMA (B. 1929)

Glittery red otherworldly forms sprout and swell across Yayoi Kusama’s Untitled (1976). The sculpture is an early and bewitching example of the artist’s series of Accumulations, a form she has continued to experiment with throughout her career. Begun in 1961, these works marked her first foray into sculpture: just weeks after moving into a loft apartment in New York City’s East 19th street, Kusama, with the help of Donald Judd, began to sew small canvas sacks stuffed with cotton. The two artists were not only friends but worked on different floors of the same building. Their creations were small and fleshy, resembling alternately phalluses, potatoes, and alien creatures. In these earliest incarnations, Kusama limited her colour palette to white, gold, and the red seen in the present work. By the start of winter that year, she had stitched hundreds of these sacks which she then began to attach to household objects. Like a parasitic animal or the Kudzu vine, they soon overwhelmed their hosts. ‘I make them,’ Kusama explained, ‘and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this obliteration’ (Y. Kusama, quoted on ‘Yayoi Kusama, Accumulation No. 1, 1962’, www.moma.org).

Three months after she stitched together her first protuberant sack, Kusama was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, the mental health condition through which much of her subsequent art would be read and discussed. Untitled was created the year before she entered a psychiatric centre in Tokyo where she has continued to live as a permanent resident ever since; Kusama had returned to Japan four years earlier, in 1973, almost sixteen years after first moving to New York. Repetition to the point of madness—the obliteration that the artist described—is perhaps the gesture uniting Kusama’s long and prolific career. The seemingly limitless fields of dots that fill her Infinity Nets and Mirror Rooms, and cover her Pumpkins, likewise seem to grow ad infinitum. As such, for the artist, illness is not an impediment but a generative force whose symptoms provide the source for her imagery. Certainly, part of the power of the Accumulations comes from their ‘overabundance, [their] repetitive surfeit’ and the way in which they appear to devour their surroundings (A Lubow, ‘Prologue’ in L. Neri and T. Goto (eds.), Yayoi Kusama, New York 2021, p. 29). These are far from static objects but animate beings that greedily menace, engulf, and command. Untitled is insistent. It will not be silenced.